[OOM] I told it not, my wrath did grow

[collects_strays]

.mercy

Visitors aren't announced before he sees them – Graham only knows someone is coming if he's taken to the privacy room. It's meant to prevent attempts at passing contraband to or from inmates. Most others rarely had visitors even once a month, let alone every week. The orderlies had stopped reading out the instructions for unlocking the door. A few joked about his popularity. In his isolated, high security cell, he was never permitted to be alone.

But this visit is early. His breakfast tray had been taken less than an hour before, the weak coffee and dry eggs turning over in his stomach. He hadn't slept at all after returning – each moment of light flickering over the bricks, of the slow drip from the sink on the far side of the cell, ran into another, like a note held too long. Until, mercifully, there was the buzzer. His hands shake slightly as he's cuffed through the bars, and the sunlight through privacy room's window flashes over his unfocused eyes.

When the buzzer sounds here, for a moment, he has the audacity to see her. She looks at him, and the scenario plays out in his mind like a familiar melody. That she made it out, that she had come here, so he'd know she was safe.




What if it doesn't make a difference?

Graham turns his head as the door unlatches. Jack Crawford, for the first time since before his aborted trial, and Alana Bloom behind him. Jack looks up, toward the window, but Alana watches him. She's pale. There are circles under Jack's eyes. They don't need to say anything, and Graham barely listens when they do. Their voices stretch like shadows, the words building up in his chest, in his throat, submerging him.

Still, he feels Beverly's gaze. It tingles like a phantom limb.

"I want to see her."


They hold it out through the bars, the way they had his suit for court. He'll need to put his arms through before they come in. When he sees it, his heart starts to pound, his hands close to shaking again. It happened the first time he saw the therapy cages, and the first time Alana's eyes appeared beyond the row of bars. Graham had learned to skim off the terror, trembling, and tears, set them aside for when they would be useful. It's what he needs to do again.

This can't be his nightmare any longer, afraid they won't let him out. That's over now. He'd fallen silent in his cage like the dead canary, lured Beverly in by throwing human lives down like poker chips.

Is this really any less than he deserves?

Graham reaches through the bars, pulls in the straightjacket. He turns, and puts his arms through it. The buzzer rings out again, and the door unlocks.

It fits better than his cheap suit.

---

.pity

Where one belongs doesn't matter. After spending enough time in one place, a body will inevitably begin to soak it up. And Graham had always been ahead of the curve in that. The shades of his surroundings flush into him like they would a chameleon's scales. Concrete in his soles and the steel of his cell bars roughening his hands. He doesn't know if he'll ever be able to flay the uniform blue entirely out of his skin. It had only been a few short weeks since he'd stopped ringing that bell, shed his humiliation and his scruples with it, yet it was all so quickly replaced. Graham remembers that in his last words before Crawford had left him, he hadn't pled his innocence, that he shouldn't be there.

I am not the intelligent psychopath you're looking for.

No, not the one they were looking for.

Now that he's finally trying, sinking his teeth into Chilton takes no effort at all. Any remaining reluctance evaporates when Chilton says Beverly's name. Directing the doctor is so easy that Graham hardly feels like the one in the cage. There's no one Chilton wants to see again less than Abel Gideon, and yet it takes Graham one conversation to make Gideon appear. Graham knows what he's doing.

So does Gideon. "You have it in you."

He has pulled both Chilton and Gideon into the Ripper's path, now knowing exactly where that path will end. Under Gideon's bravado, Graham can feel the desperate gamble he's faced with, caught between not one, but two killers. The last, and only piece of evidence against Lecter crumbles with Gideon's bet on silence. But there's a quiet relief that comes with it, and he doesn't fully understand until –

"He won't be caught."

This isn't a nightmare, to get to end it, to stop it all.

Gideon is removed from the hall first, leaving Graham alone in his cage. He retreats from it, not to the river, but to the forest, watching a shadowed figure move among the trees, its outline sliding between the trunks the way a reflection slips along a pane of glass. Next to him, Abigail has leveled her rifle, left foot forward, her hand steady beneath it.

"The other you shoot," she echoes.

Nearly half an hour has passed before Chilton enters the hall. Before he can sit, Graham asks to call his lawyer. It's one privilege he is entitled to, though he's never asked for it before. Chilton has to have a phone brought down, sends him to make the call from the privacy room. In the end, it only takes a few minutes – without explanation, Graham tells his lawyer to contact Freddie Lounds.

Direct, obnoxious, and devoid of pity, she's a welcome sight. It makes their words smooth and, of all things, honest. He feels nothing in using her, and she's an expert at setting out bait. It's the last person Graham plans to push into Dr. Lecter's path. She knows the drill.

Pity has no place in here.

---

.love

Matthew Brown's smile is barely askew, pulling a little more to the left. Sharp, and callous, like a string of barbed wire. It doesn't fit, but Graham still likes how it feels.

But Brown has little else to offer. His thoughts feel thick and plodding inside Graham's skull. There was talent in how he had slipped into walls, drawing just as little attention to himself. Now that he'd stepped out, however, his eyes flashed openly, he drew out his words, a cheap way to keep his already captive audience. He is different, but not at all the way Graham is – empty of empathy, rather than drowned by it. Left to rationalize that deficit by deeming it vestigial. His admiration for Graham's "work" is sincere, but razor thin. Now that he's seen the poet, the poetry looks even more like a shallow imitation. Brown sees, but doesn't feel.

If there's anything in this box worth keeping, it will be that sharp smile.

But it is love. Love doesn't need depth, or understanding, or empathy. All it needs is need. Graham can feel the tug of it when Brown undoes the locks on his cage, lets him wander freely. It follows his few steps, as far as a sunlit window, frosted and lined in steel mesh, but still enough for the light to hit his eyes, feel warm on his face. It's a gift he appreciates much more than the ear or the bailiff it came from. Inevitably, he considers that Dr. Lecter was right. There's no reason to let this love be wasted.

Yet he doesn't say it. Not as Brown approaches him, not when they leave the only space where they can speak openly. It's a different sort of terror than what came with seeing the cages or the straightjacket. That was an old, intimate, and common fear, the risk of letting others see what you are.

This is new, a still-smoldering realization that he's not thinking of Beverly, or Jack, or Miriam Lass. He's not thinking of anything more than making it stop. That he knows the moment he says those words, the world will snap into sharp clarity. That while before he barely had enough self to cup between his hands, he could now so readily contemplate such a selfish act.

Nothing marks one's will on the world more than murder.

It's when they've returned to his cell that Brown asks him to say it. Say the words. It echoes the tide in his mind, to end it. End it all now. Just say it. The cost still weighs heavy, like a stone, but one hewn away by the water. Worn and shrinking, it doesn't ground him any longer. He'd shed his pride, peeled away at his conscience. What is his innocence really worth?

The cell door latches behind him. His terror crescendos as he turns to face Brown – when he speaks, low as it is, he knows his voice is his own.

"I want you to kill Hannibal Lecter."



Brown doesn't need to answer. He flashes that smile, one more time, and steps away from the bars.

---

.peace

He doesn't feel like himself.
That's kind of what you do isn't it.

It's not like that. It's not someone else, nothing to mirror, no reflecting another's eyes in his own. It's literal. He doesn't feel like himself. The mold of his body seems mismatched, incongruous to how it somehow should be, the shape in his mind clashing with the feel of his limbs and the line of his spine. His skin is stretched, slicing across his back, splitting along the seams. He moves his fingers, testing the strength of the shell that has curled around him. As though he could crack through it, rip it off –


I fear not knowing who I am.

But he knows who he is, and who he isn't. Like he knew it would, a lens had fallen into place, and everything has become so much clearer. His reality has oriented not around the hall buzzer, or the face of a clock, but toward the impending moment of Hannibal Lecter's death. And the tether of his responsibility for it. It hooks him when Alana says his name, as she lingers outside his cell. He doesn't answer with her first name – he's not her equal any longer. Just a few feet from him, her voice feels as distant as though she were calling to him from across a field. Soft like lights prickling in the darkness, his home floating like a little boat in the night.

It wasn't his home. Alana isn't his friend. Past that coming moment, Graham knew he wouldn't see either of them again.

This isn't a nightmare. This blood is real. She won't come back after it, he knows that. But any regret for it is stale and tasteless. It's what Dr. Lecter wanted – for him to be alone, unique – but even knowing that can't make it bitter. After all, Hannibal had been his friend, too.

Once Alana has gone, the only remaining sound is the dripping from the faucet across his cell, counting off as each second falls and drains away. His heartbeat, at first drumming against its new and unfamiliar body, slows to match this steady tempo. No longer footsteps fleeing into silence - now he's not running away. He won't retreat, not even to the stream. He has no reason to. With his pulse reverberating through what have become his fingers, his skin, he feels self-aware, grounded in the present moment. Distantly, he wonders what Hannibal had said to Abigail Hobbs, or if she really did just finally get it –

I thought something was wrong with me.

Graham doesn't feel wrong, or ugly. The beating resonates along his skull, like lights flashing in his eyes. He can see it now. How he'd taken everything from Abigail the moment he'd killed her father, and then felt so bad because it had felt so good. How she could end Nicholas Boyle, wish she killed her father, stand aside and let all those other girls walk past her to die. How he had lured Beverly in, and then stood aside so her killer could sweep through him. Like he had before, over and over again.

The dripping from the faucet has gone quiet. The sink fills quickly, the overflow lapping over the edge, splattering across the floor.

Is that why he had called it ugly? So he could deny it to himself, deny it to her. A trace of her father still reaching through him. It's something Dr. Lecter would ask.





Not anymore.